From Individual Agency to Structural Empowerment: A Grounded Theory Model of Women’s Leadership Transformation in Sport Organizations

Abstract

Women remain underrepresented in senior leadership across many sport organizations despite sustained attention to gender equity. Research has often treated this problem either as a deficit in women’s preparation for leadership or as a consequence of organizational barriers. The present study develops a process-oriented explanation that connects individual agency with the organizational and institutional conditions required for structural empowerment. This article reports a focused analysis of the qualitative phase of a larger doctoral study on women’s leadership transformation in Iranian sport organizations. Twenty-four semi-structured interviews with women holding managerial or executive experience in sport and experts in sport management were analyzed using a Glaserian grounded theory approach based on constant comparison, open coding, selective coding, and theoretical coding. The full study produced 133 refined initial codes, 43 subcategories, 15 main categories, and five overarching dimensions. For the present article, the results were organized around the transition-oriented categories that explain how women move from constrained participation toward effective and sustainable leadership: individual agency, competence development, support and networking, inclusive climate, structural empowerment, institutional accountability, transformation strategies, and transformation outcomes. The findings show that agency and competence are necessary but insufficient. Their effects depend on access to professional networks, senior support, psychological safety, information, resources, decision authority, transparent rules, and monitoring. Structural empowerment emerged as the critical bridge between holding a managerial title and exercising real leadership. Sustainable transformation was associated with coordinated structural redesign, cultural change, and coalition building, producing individual, organizational, and institutional outcomes. The model shifts attention from “fixing women” to aligning individual capability with organizational power structures and accountability mechanisms. It offers an empirically grounded framework for sport organizations seeking to convert women’s presence in leadership into durable influence and institutionalized gender equity.